A Searcher’s Second Act: Building a $25m Holdco

But back back then, we were kind of doing a lot of this very manually and trying to understand how to filter for high quality laboratories, look at labs that had accreditations, labs that. you know, had key sectors they were servicing and trying to build those out.

So we launched that in 2020, did our first acquisition then, and then have since bolted on a few more companies, including buying back LK Industries, which is a fun story to elaborate on, but have continued to add more testing companies and are out looking to do even more of that as we go forward. What has changed slightly in our approach is that

And then the other thing we've kind of pivoted on is, although we still have... you know, somewhat of a interest in looking broadly, we see that most of the deals we're going to do are probably going to be focused on kind of Southern, kind of middle US kind of, so really kind of drawing somewhat of a regional aspect to what we're doing.

And then lastly, we evolved to see a shared service aspect, a services center that we want to offer across our companies and happy to elaborate a little bit more, but that is something that came kind of as an evolution of TXC as we went forward. Great.

Yeah, we are going to hear about the shared services there just in a sec. But when you said AI has made searching, I guess, easier, can you elaborate on exactly what AI would do today versus what you guys were doing manually just a few years ago?

Yeah, so, you know, I vividly remember kind of in the early days of running TXE, going through and, you know, manually scraping a lot of data on trying to get the, based on like the accreditation these labs have, they're listed and trying to really, you know, manually find owners and owner's contact info and pulling a lot of that. That same exercise can be done now with... an instruction to AI.

So pull this information, summarize it. And so I think what it's done is just made our ability to navigate those channels faster. And, you know, before where, you know, Workstream might feel like something an intern could do or something that you just really need someone to be behind the screen.

You can really get that done kind of automatically. I will say it's a tool. It doesn't kind of...

fully fulfill all the needs of how you search. But it is a tool to give you a lot of that info and filter it for you on the front end. And then, you know, we still very much believe in like high touch sourcing methods.

And so going quickly into finding out, can we connect with these business owners? Not necessarily with the TXE hat on, but with the operator's hat on from one of our fellow companies. And that's been a good way to connect because sometimes these owners are not ready for a call from a

from a fund or ready to have a call with the buyer, but reaching out as their colleague that runs a very similar business in Houston, that's a very effective way of talking just owner to owner about operations, businesses, and kind of building that rapport. And, you know, over time that leads to a set of conversations that may allow a transaction to take place.